Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower (VII of VIII)-Let's Make a Plan
In his second term, President Eisenhower had realized something important about our “New Look” plans for massive retaliation on the Communists. Different military services had developed separately their plans for conducting attacks.
That wasn’t good. If we were doing a massive retaliation, our bombers and fighter-bombers approaching a target might even run into each other. Or the nuclear bombs one service dropped might destroy the incoming bombs and bombers of another service in something was called “fratricide.” The last bombs to fall might do nothing, said one planner, but “make the rubble bounce.”
Really inefficient.
So in his second term, President Eisenhower ordered the different services to create a joint Single Integrated Operational Plan. An “operational plan” is a plan for conducting a military operation, in this case a nuclear war. With a SIOP (pronounced “sigh-op”) in place, the plans of the different services would all have been “integrated” into one operational plan. No more running into each other.
It had become obvious to President Eisenhower, however, among others, that there were fierce rivalries among the different armed services. Rivalries that sometimes seemed fiercer than our rivalry with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower noticed that each service seemed to be making budget and weapons requests as if it were the only one, or the most important one anyway.
There were strong rivalries even within the services. In the Air Force, partisans of missiles vied with partisans of bombers. In the Navy, partisans of the new Submarine Launched Polaris missiles vied with partisans of the aircraft carrier battle groups. The services with “strategic” missions vied with the supporters of the “tactical” forces in the Army and Navy.
Obviously, then, the challenge in coming up with a SIOP would be not just strategic. It would also be political.
Having a SIOP might help the President and his Secretary of Defense get a handle on the budgetary business. We were now spending far more on our military than other countries were. Much more than the Soviets. More than all other countries in the world combined, as a matter of fact.
To come up with the actual operational plan, a group was created called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff. The JSTPS would have on it representatives from the all the services that had strategic missions. It would be a “joint” staff, not just staff from one service. It would be stationed, however, at the Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, Nebraska. Its director would not be the Commander in Chief of SAC, or not necessarily. Now and then, an admiral might become director of the JSTPS. Maybe even an Army general or a Marine commandant, though their missions were “tactical,” not “strategic.”
The main players on the JSTPS, though, would be the Air Force and the Navy. That’s to whom President Eisenhower had given custody of the very big nuclear weapons we called “strategic.” (During Truman’s administration our atomic bombs had been in the custody of the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.)
The Army would have custody of the atomic weapons we called “tactical.” The Navy would have some too. “Tactical” nuclear weapons might be used if you could find large groups of attacking enemy soldiers or sailors to use them on.
The tactical operations wouldn’t be embraced by the SIOP.
In a pinch, the tactical nuclear weapons could certainly be used on cities, I suppose, or on industrial or military targets for purposes that could be designated“strategic.” After all, some of the “tactical” weapons yielded as much or more than the Hiroshima bomb had yielded.
President Eisenhower set out the general guidelines the SIOP should follow, presumably along the lines of his New Look policy. Future SIOPs would be generated in the same way, it was thought. Whoever was President would produce general guidelines for how they would want a nuclear war to be conducted. Massive retaliation or maybe something else. These guidelines would be forwarded to the JSTPS. The JSTPS would draw up an operational plan that was supposed to follow those guidelines. Sounded sensible.
You knew the JSTPS would not want to share the operational plan it came up with with very many people, or at all. Not even with its own bosses, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone with the civilians in the Defense Department. The more the actual plan got shared, the more it might get shared. The JSTPS might prefer to give only a general briefing to its bosses in the Defense Department, implying “you can trust us.”
It’s wouldn’t be easy to challenge your own JSTPS, but you’d hope that someone in the President’s Defense Department would take a good look at the actual plans to see if the President’s guidance had been followed. The JSTPS might not make that easy.
Who was going to make sure the JSTPS’s SIOP followed the president’s guidelines?
Anybody?1
The answer to this question can be found in the extraordinary memoir of General George Lee Butler (retired), the last Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command and the first CINC of the Strategic Command that replaced it in 1992. See Butler, Uncommon Cause, Vol II, Outskirts Press, 2017, pp. 1-50.